Awards & Nominations
VECTORR has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
Breakthrough
Solar Sailer
Summary
We have developed a simulation software that is capable of accurately depicting motion of celestial bodies with only the initial data of position and velocity of the planets. It is also capable of representing the motion of a spaceship at different speed encompassing phenomena like time dilation, gravitational time dilation, relativistic doppler shift. The simulation builds mainly on the top of Einstein's special and general theory of relativity.
How We Addressed This Challenge
We have developed a hyper-realistic simulation of our travel through the vast space at varying speeds covering the theoretical foundations of high speed travel that has been set up by Einstein's general theory of relativity.
We find the significance of the project in the sense that it helps to experience and visualize how travel through the space feels like. Upon the command of the user(who actually is inside the cockpit of a spaceship), this simulation software provides user the experience of how far have we come till date in the field of travelling in the space and what we have yet to achieve. It does all the work while while keeping it as real as possible and not violating the laws of physics. It idolizes to the greatest theories that have been developed in science.
We expect the project to be easily accessible such that anyone with the curiosity and zeal would get a complete breakdown about how travelling through space using different propulsion technologies at different velocities would feel like.
How We Developed This Project
Initially, we were pretty excited to create a solution utilizing state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms ( in challenges such as hazard tracking, spotting fire, etc.) but we hadn't decided completely. As time flew, videos were published in the NASA SpaceApps Challenge YouTube channel, we came to know more about the possibilities of things we could do. We were inspired by the work done by the winners from the previous year- 'Star Struck' and decided to take it to the outer space.
We wanted things to be easy to understand, didn't want anyone to get stuck trying to visualize all the complex physical phenomena at once. We believe that such visual tools can help develop and foster curiosity about universe and beyond among people. Most importantly, we didn't want it to be boring. Hence we divided the work into three parts. Two of us handled all the related physics, two of us handled the rendering part and the rest handled the data.
Since we were dealing with high speed as well as very large masses, the use of Einstein’s special and general theory of relativity was inevitable as we required accuracy and hyper-realism. These were the foundations under which our simulation software was developed. The features of the physics engine used in the simulation include:
- Use of Schwarzschild metric which is the solution to Einstein’s field equation to accurately predict the motion of heavenly bodies.
- Use of causality so that information doesn’t travel instantaneously.
- Relativistic time dilation and gravitational time dilation at high speeds and high gravitational potentials.
- The concept of locality so that we do not need too much data to predict the orbits of planet.
- Effects of high-speed travel such as relativistic doppler effect and length contraction including the change of field of view
The code has been written in C++ language and the rendering has been done with the help of OpenGL 3.0. It should be noted that the simulation has been created from scratch without using any available game engines. The Modern OpenGL has been used in combination with the GLSL (Open GL Shading Language) to render whatever is visible to the user.
We learned a lot about whatever part we had undertaken. Not only that we were connected through online platforms such as google meet to share about the things we had learned. This surely helped to brush up our programming skills. At the beginning it was difficult to collaborate and connect it all together. We had to have enough information and knowledge which took a lot of time. And finally during the last 48 hours we materialized everything we learned and knew into this simulation software. Working on this challenge has surely brought out the best in us, helped us grow as a team and taught us some best life lessons.
Enhancements:
Further improvement in this project may include the concept of gaming, proper user interface, expansion of the system to include other solar systems and planets, creation of whole new solar system as desired by the user and so on. Along with that, the simulation could be edited in future to exhibit the warping of spacetime and other processes. The project is capable of calculating gravitational waves which we could be later added on the visualization. The possibilities are immense.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
Data has been pretty vital for the working of our project. We have highly emphasized on making the simulation look as real as possible. To do so we needed accurate data about the planets, their dimensions, speed, composition and so on. We used the planetary system data to initialize the simulation software but once the initialization is complete the simulation is self sustaining. However, with the movement through the solar system, we have view the information about the desired celestial body on the screen as per the need of the user. Apart from that we have used various NASA data to gain knowledge about the space.
Project Demo
https://youtu.be/CSOPjny0mKk
Project Code
Data & Resources
- https://eyes.nasa.gov/
- https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/
- Special Relativity, Electrodynamics and General Relativity by John B. Kogut
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_Doppler_effect
- https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/our-solar-system/overview/
- https://www.solarsystemscope.com/textures/
- https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/features/cosmic/nearest_star_info.html
- https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20140000851